Time to analyze

Click the Analyze menu option at the top
of your screen. You will see many options to choose from. Some options lead to
complex analyses. Others lead to those that are quite simple. We will be using
the Analyze menu a lot in this book.

Describe your data

Remember that with measures of central
tendency and dispersion, we are trying to describe data. So it makes sense that
you should click the Descriptive Statistics selection. After this, click
Frequencies.

The Frequencies box

This box will appear with two windows.
You will see your variable name in the window on the left. See the variable Age
in the left window? Your first goal will be to get that variable name over to
the window on the right. But how do you do that? It’s easy. Just highlight the
variable by clicking on it. Then click the button with the arrow that you see in
the middle of the two windows. I have highlighted it here in red.

After you click the arrow button

The Age variable should appear in the
window on the right. Variables that appear in the window on the right are the
ones that will be analyzed. So by moving the variable over, you are telling SPSS
to analyze this variable.

So why did we just do that?

Shouldn’t SPSS know that the Age
variable is the one we want to analyze? After all, it’s the only one there! The
reason we move our variable from left to right window is that sometimes people
have more than one variable in their data file. In these cases, they will see a
long list of variables in the window on the left. They have to choose from this
list and move only the variables of interest to the window on the right hand
side for analysis.

Statistics button

The next step is to click the Statistics
button in the bottom of the Frequencies box.

Frequencies: Statistics box

A Frequencies:Statistics box will
appear. This box will let you choose a variety of statistics to use on your data
set. You can see groupings of various types of statistics like central tendency
and dispersion.

Check the statistics that you want to compute

You will see little white boxes next to
each type of statistics. You can put a check in one of those boxes simply by
clicking the box. You check tells SPSS to compute that particular statistic
named next to the box. Because you are interested in central tendency and
dispersion, you can check the boxes in these areas. You can also check other
boxes if you are curious. When you are finished, click the Continue button.

Back to the Frequencies box

When you do the previous steps, you will
get back to the Frequencies box. Just click OK when this happens.

And after a few seconds of processing…

You should see your results. SPSS calls
the results the output. It creates a special output file that is
different than the file you used to enter the your data.

What you will see

The output file for this type of
analysis will look something like this.

But wait!

You are not completely finished with
data analysis. The final step is to save the output file to a meaningful place
with a meaningful name – just like the data file you saved earlier. Ideally, you
would save both files to the same disk or folder on your computer.

How do I save the output file?

Just click File and the Save like you
did with the data file. It’s easy. Choose a name that will be meaningful to you
in the future. This name should be slightly different than the name that you
gave to your data file. This difference in names will help you to tell the files
apart in the future. For this file, I will call it Age_Output. This name tells
me that the file stores the results of the analysis for the Age variable.

A new file extension

Remember how we talked about the data
file extension .sav? There is a different file extension that SPSS uses for
output files. This extension is .spo. So, if you used the name Age_Output, the
official name of the file would be Age_Output.spo.

Warning

You must close the output file if you
want to go on and do another analysis in SPSS. Otherwise, the output from your
new analysis will be added to the output of your old analysis. This gets
confusing!